who decided what the basic forms are? how are they decided?

>>2717241
If it looks like a sphere it's probably a sphere, if it looks like a box it's probably a box, if it looks like a shitpost it's probably a shitpost.

>>2717241
If you want a serious answer, try breaking down something into something simpler than cubes/spheres while still being recognizable.

This is probably just more funposting though.

God is dead, and we killed him. We are still slaves to mother nature however, and those shapes are the industry standard for teachers trying help students learn general art within a certain amount of time.

>>2717241

1. Cube can be seen as visualization of carthesian coordinates, basic system that describes space.

2. Sphere is for spherical coordinate system, also very important one. With sphere and actually with 2D circle you can describe lots of things in 2D/3D space, define vectors etc.

3. Cylinder is for cylindrical coordinate system. Very important one.


All of the above: cyllindrical, spherical and carthesian coordinate system have pretty clear conversions between each other.

4. Prism/pyramid: every cube can be divided into 2/4 pyramids. No exception. Basically you can collapse it to that form.

5. Cone in a projection is a cylinder with apex in infinity. It's simply this.


There's a branch of mathematics called projective geometry. Basically all of the above, especially cubes, spheres and cylinders are pretty important to project shapes.

>>2717264

Moreover:

>why not hexagonal prism

Its base is regular polygon and regular hexagon doesn't really differ significantly from regular octagon, decagon, dodecagon, hexadecagon etc.

Moreover, all those regular polygons are more or less rough approximations of the circle they are invariably tending towards as the number of the vertices rises.

>dodecahedrons

Same, tends to sphere shape.


Importance of sphere should be no-brainer. What is actually more interesting is said importance of cube and its mutations: pyramid, cylinder (cross of sphere and cube) and cone (fucked up cylinder).

>>2717241
probably god

>>2717241
The basic forms are spheres, cylinders and cubes, the others you listed are just their derivatives - cone is a tapered cylinder, pyramid a tapered cube, ellipsoid is a morfed sphere etc.

It just so happens that these three are easy to understand in space and thinking in these terms puts more structure into the way you simplify complex forms.